Diskonnected: Remote Learning Amidst the Pandemic
By Clyde Anderson
The telecommunications giant Philippine Long Distance Telephone (PLDT) announced on Wednesday, September 23, that the company will be providing a much inefficient internet service from September 25 to 29. This is due to the maintenance activity of the operator of the international trans-Pacific submarine cable system, Asia-America Gateway (AAG). The said cables are located in the seas of Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region of China. Subscribers were assured that the slow services will only be during peak hours — 8 am to 5 pm, and during primetime. This retardation of internet speed, however, is detrimental to the Philippines’ economic activities, such as work-from-home setups and the remote learning of students.
Prior to the opening of classes, many students from different UP campuses called for a safe opening of classes. To recall, a P7.6 billion was deducted from the P73.7 billion budget of SUCs for 2020 to give way for Bayanihan to Heal as One Act. Besides this, as of September 14, the government has already released a P389.2 billion in response to the pandemic. However, known effective measures such as mass testing and improved contact tracing were not among the prioritized, even more so the procurement of laptops to students in need and improved internet connectivity to make remote learning effective and efficient for all. The burden should not be on the teachers and the students, but on the entire administrative system of UP, on DepEd, CHED, and the Duterte Administration — to make sure no one participating in remote learning gets left behind and disadvantaged by their situation and circumstance.
These problems all fall under the government’s unreadiness in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Health workers and hospitals are still swamped with patients but compensated poorly, teachers are still struggling to complete their modules and coursepacks, while the Philippines’ loans are ballooning because of the mismanagement of funds of this administration. To add to that, we are greeted every day with new distractions by our very own government: Manila Bay White Sand project, Harry Roque swimming with dolphins, Mocha Uson with another poorly researched status, etc. These ‘news’ which reach the headlines distract us from the problem at hand: that it is already 6 months into the quarantine and we still find ourselves in square one. We are stagnating, and our so-called resilience is just surface level. We cannot trust the band-aid solutions our officials implement, it will cost us our lives. It already cost the lives of some, as manifested in academic-related suicides. Know that these names are not just statistics, but are real people who have suffered and died because of the incompetence of the current administration.
Zooming in on education, we call for a #LigtasNaBalikEskwela.
